Episode #5 - Speed And The Spyke
Original Airdate December 9th, 2000

Storm's discovers her nephew Evan is a mutant, and offers him a place at the Institute. Meanwhile, a fellow mutant at his school, Pterio becomes jealous of his popularity.

Credits
Written By: Bob Forward
Directed By: Gary Graham
Music Composed By: William Anderson
Guest Starring: Kirby Morrow as Cyclops/Scott Summers, Scott McNeil as Wolverine/Logan, Venus Terzo as Jean Grey, David Kaye as Professor Charles Xavier, Brad Swaile as Nightcrawler/Kurt Wagner, Richard Ian Cox as Pterio/Quicksilver and Christopher Judge as Magneto.

Review: Spyke has never really been much of a controversy with fans of X-Men: Evolution. From the very beginning, the world and his friend hated Spyke and bashed him endlessly as soon as this very episode finished. Quite why a new original character was introduced is unknown, but he wasn’t welcome in the show to a lot of people.

Whilst I didn’t absolutely loathe him like I do Nightcrawler, there’s little denying that the character is pretty annoying, at the best of times. This particular episode is one of the season’s weaker episodes, as it not only introduces Spyke, but his adversary Quicksilver. Quicksilver has always been an odd character to me, I never really cared for him much in the comics at all, and I found his relationship to be rather disturbing. This show’s version of Pterio is better than the comic version… and he’s still as annoying as hell! The conflict with his Father, Magneto, was never really expanded on as much as it arguably should’ve been and the character never really became anything more than irritating until Wanda finally appeared towards the end of the second season.

The rest of the episode features everything found in previous episodes. The new mutants resistance to joining the school, stopping an evil mutant from doing wrong, and the new mutant joining The X-Men and the villain joining The Brotherhood. It was an ambitious task to introduce the majority of mutants in there own episodes, but the lack of originality, far too many X-Men/Brotherhood fights and annoying characters made for a very, very dull string of episodes.